Time of My Life

Watching Dirty Dancing at Aldwych theatre last Friday transported me back to 1988.

The days of shoulder padded dresses, bicycle shorts and McGyver. Thanks to a weekly dose of Kasey Casem on American Top 40, I wanted to style my hair ala Debbie Gibson. My fashion idol was my older cousin who wore blue eye shadow and runched up her jacket sleeves. I was a member of the David Copperfield and Rick Astley fan club.

I was an obstinate 12 year old, desperately wanting to go watch THE movie but my parents would not hear of it (in retrospect who would blame them? It's not a movie for a 12 year old). I remember moping around thinking how unfair life was.

This time around, thank god shoulder pads have faded into a natural death (although this cyclical fashion thing creeps me out. Never know when some trash from the past is going to be recycled) and I could stay out as late as I wanted.

Dirty Dancing 2006 started on a rain soaked note. We girls were wet, cold and hungry as we battled the downpour and quickly grabbed a snack before hurrying to our seats. Suddenly, the lights dimmed and an anticipated hush enveloped. A flicker of colours and sounds jolted us into life and like a thunderbolt, Johnny Castle gyrated his way into our hearts. The 90% female crowd went wild. For 2 1/2 hours, we watched lurrvvve blooming at Kellerman's and waited for Baby and Johnny to dance. We hardly sat towards the end, joining in the songs and moving to the beat.

If you were in Holborn last Friday and wondered why on earth droves of girls were rowdily screaming at the top of their voices as they were walking to the tube, including my mad friend Ewok, you will know now. Amidst the pelting rain, we were missing Johnny and singing I've had the Time of Life....

The Business of Business

Farewell, Mr. Milton Freidman.

His passing made me lurch for awhile. I've spent so much time reading his work, if only to criticise it, that it feels like saying goodbye to a good friend. I have to admit admiration for his work although I am very much centre-leftist (there, I've said it).

Chicken Curry for Two

It is a cold, listless autumn day and I am attempting to make a poor replica of my mother's chicken curry.

There is something so special about my mother's Sunday chicken currys that I just can't replicate. The pounding and grinding starts early in the morning. These days, even my mother uses Baba's curry powder but a long time ago, she would insist on making her masala from scratch. As the slow pounding of the cumin and coriander seeds gather momentum on the batu giling, a muffled, uniform sound reverberates in the kitchen. My weekly job is to slice the shallots (because nobody else will want to do it) and every week, my eyes will smart as I attack the sinister red bulbs. My baby sister BS pounds the ginger and garlic while middle sister MS will slice the vegetables. In the background, Radio 6, the local Tamil section, will blare Sunday morning fare and my dad, often caught unaware, will be humming along in a most inharmonious tone.

There is something very earthy and primal about feeling fresh ground spices with your fingers. It is as if the spices are whispering conspiratorially, telling you about their secrets and all the joys to be imbibed. As the cinnamon, cloves and cardamon splutter in the hot kuali, the piqued senses feel a rush. The infusion spontaneously feels reassuring, like a hug from a child. All the usual family rows and bickering of the week will evaporate by Sunday afternoon, after lunch. It must be the spices working their way into our spirits.

I've read a few books by that Chitra Divakaruni who writes about women and spices and how transformative the relationship can be. But I think that those books exoticise spices, make them sound sexy for the Mat Salleh. She ends up sounding phoney and hollow. Just like the one that was made into a really, really bad movie starring Aishwarya Rai, Mistress of Spice (or something like that).

For me, the spices are like happy family secrets. A joyous female secret. What my mother learnt from her own mother and her mother before her. Nobody really tells you the real quantity of the spices to be used. Just agak-agak. It is for you to know and feel. Instinct.

The spices will let you know.

Fragrant on their own but together, creating a generational mosaic. Spanning past memories and stretching to untold future possibilities. As I stir in my own spices in a foreign country, I remember the women in my family who braved seas and sickness to move to another country. Colonial Malaya.

My maternal great grandmother. A proud woman and pioneer land owner in a country ravaged by the Japanese Occupation. She wakes up one day to find her husband gone missing, only to be told that he has been taken away by the Japanese for interrogation, on trumped up charges of spying. He never comes back. A few weeks later, she sees his car, the only car in the village, being driven by a Japanese General. She knows then that her husband has been tortured to death. She is alone in a new country, illiterate and has three young children. She quickly learns a new language, Malay. Turns her agriculture and poultry into a profitable business and raises her three children the best she can. In her last days, her speech is reduced to gibberish and she often thinks that she is still in India. She dies senile but leaves gold bars under her bed for her grandchildren.

If you see a photograph of my paternal great grandmother, you will see a frail, docile woman with a big smile and twinkling eyes. She will tell many stories about her village in South India, at the Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu border. In the early years, she received repeated abuse, physical and emotional from her husband. One day, she decides enough is enough and pushes the old geezer down a well. She makes it look like an accident and moves on with her life, raising her children in peace. She dies at the ripe age of 90, beady eyed and alert until the end (This is one of the first things I told M when we were going out. Don't mess around-women in my family bump their men off when they drive us up the wall).

Somehow, these spices link me with these women as much as blood ties. These spices have travelled along with them as they have with me. Salving the heart on cold days. Firing the spirit as we build our lives in strange lands. Supplying sustenance in the form of large doses of laughter.

I hold on to the family chicken curry recipe, knowing full well that it is layered by the spirit of a few generations of women. I let the pot simmer and immerse it with all the love I have.

And serve chicken curry for two.

XXXXX

Part of myMemory & Food series, others include:

Talking About Tea

Mr.Ho's Char Kueh Teow

Canai

Swiss Miss

Recent work + fun trip to Zurich and Lucerne. Sat enjoying cool mountain air, meditating before a placid, blue lake and enveloped by a serene feeling of time stopping, if just for awhile.

Heidi-land was the perfect retreat.

Oh, and the cheese, the chocolates...

I really, really needed to go away somewhere and this trip came rolling by at the perfect time. Of course, afterwards, came back to mountains of work (pun intended).



God's in His Heaven
All's right with the world.

The Hour is Now

Haven't updated forever. Doesn't mean that life hasn't been updating itself. Life is one of those strange things. I may sit and fret about my job (or lack of it), my body, my lifestyle, my hair. But time is indifferent to this. So life slowly trickles by, imperceptible but inevitable. That I will never ever get this day, hour, minute, second again sometimes fills me with a kind of hopeless trepidation.

The reality is life will pass by whether I am enjoying it, being depressed or plain miserable or otherwise. I have maintained a diary since I was 11 and today, if I were to flip through the all those years again, all that will surface will be how horribly angsty life was. But if I sit back and recall, some of my most wonderful times are also there, buried under the rubble.

This is starting to be one of those aimless rambling posts but indulge me will you?

Two important literary events have occurred in recent days and I feel compelled to record them. First, Kiran Desai's surprise Booker win. I haven't read the book and so must reserve judgement but I am glad that such a likeable person won. Would any other winner declare that 'the compromise' usually wins? Niceness hardly gets any points these days and Desai gets full points for that. Literary blogger cum diva, Jaiarjun has a good summary of taking these awards with buckets of salt. My only concern is that this annual Booker thing is tiring. I haven't even finished the books on last years list and now there's a whole load of new books to be read. Like Hisham Mater's much praised In the Country of Men. Groan.

I know it doesn't matter whether a book is on the list or not or whatever. One is to read whatever one fancies. But I hate to be unfashionable in the literary world. Isn't it enough that in the sartorial one, I am still in boot cut jeans because I can't wiggle into those skinny jeans?

And of course, Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel. My Turkish friend Maz will sneer. 'There are many other good writers, right here in Turkey. Orhan Pamuk rides on politics to make himself popular', he will say. While I am a Pamuk devotee, I do have to agree that the award is more for political reasons:

"The overriding question is how do the writer's politics factor into the
nomination and award? Is the prize for literature or for politics? More and
more, critics say, the prize "has gone to a person who has the correct sex,
geographical address, ethnic origin and political profile" - correct as
determined by the Swedish Academy. Swedish literary critic Mats Gellerfelt,
quoted in a New Yorker article in 1999, agreed: "The ideal candidate for the
Nobel Prize today," he said, "would be a lesbian from Asia"

I am of course delighted that the founder of the Grameen Bank won the prize for peace. That is a most deserving win. The lives that have been transformed through Grameen Bank initiatives has been nothing short of amazing.

That apart, on the personal front, work has been happening in crazy fashion (when does it not?). Its term time again and the department is swollen with undergrads. Every year, I plan (plan being the operative word) to burn all their essays, inevitably plagiarised from the standard text books. How stupid do these kids think I am?

We've got an explosion of postgrads this year for some strange reason. Fresh faced fools (FFFs), all charmed with the academia, thinking that their research is going to change the world and everyone will die to give them a job. Hah. Wait till I see them next year, when I would have submitted and they would still be stuck in their second year, all fat and pimply from the stress. I'm sorry but this maelstrom means that my Chapter is not working. It is stuck at page 5. How crap, crap, crap is that. It's been giving me migraine and gastritis. And goddamit, this bloody thesis has made FAT. What's with fat? It happens suddenly and dawns with a thud on your thighs and ass. Inside, I still feel thin and if I don't look at full length mirrors, I am still alright as I waddle along.

Ira, my Italian friend, has been so worked up with her chapters that she has been having heart palpitations. And Mari just stops shaving and takes on a cave-man style for months on end. I know other people get stressed. My investment banker friends have very stressed lives. But at least they get paid to be stressed. FFFs will take time to realise all this. The academic backbiting, publishing whores, the now-you-see-him-now-you-don't supervisor. And they are at the bottom of the food chain for god's sake.

The truth is I am bored. Bored. Bored. Bored. I have become a boorish bore (alliteration!) Excuse me for now. Even I can't stand my own company.

I went to LFW

Mundane life has just been work, work erhm work. So managed to wrangle an invite to Singaporean Ashley Isham's show at the London Fashion Week. It helps to tag along friends who are well-connected cause one gets to sit on the second row (with a real cool journalist pass)and pretend that it was all so, duh, normal. I loved the collection, very wearable and moved from hot sophisticated to high drama. Celeb sightings were low though as everyone apparently was hung over from the Vogue party the day before -I only saw James Martin, the TV chef, Tamara Beckwith and Stuart Rose of M&S. There were some other C-listers as well.

Strange Funk

In a strange funk with multiple datelines and PMS.

A few week ago, Kiran Desai was reading The Inheritance of Loss. There was a fair bit of brouhaha as it's now in the Booker longlist and a few other literary types were there as well. Like the poet Benjamin Zephaniah (whom my young cousin describes as weird-cool). I love the title. The Inheritance of Loss. It has such an evocative, almost sensuous rhythm to it. This is the first time I've ever been to a reading with dinner thrown in. Very charming, over samosas and masala thosa!

XXXX

I got this from my PhD support network and it cracked me up:

Top 10 Reasons to do a PhD

1. Thought Dr. would look good on a credit card

2. Wanted to add nothing whatsoever to the sum knowledge of humankind

3. Saw the character Ross Geller from Friends as role model

4. Quench thirst to explore ethnobiosocioanthropsycholinguistics of sudoku

5. Get to wear jeans to work

6. Believed urban legend that doctors get free upgrade from airplanes

7. Delusional belief about curing AIDS/Cancer/stupidity

8. Peer pressure from nerds

9. Disdain for humdrum things like salary, career prospects, employee benefits

10. Too clever for law school too nice for politics

Stress Monster

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Snarrrrrrllll.

I'll talk next week.

Merdeka

Selamat Hari Merdeka to Malaysians everywhere.

God. I miss home (and nasi lemak, char kueh teow, biryani at Insaf, nasi kandar penang, lobak, mee goreng mamak, wan tan mee, nasi paprik.....).

Sniff.

Manglish Speaklah

My parents flew back to KL a few days ago. There's a sudden hush around the house. I call my mother. 'The house is really quiet', I mumble. There's a pause. And then she says, 'now you know how I feel when all of you leave'.

Harumpphh.

I had fun playing tourist guide, this being their first trip here. I had warned them about a few things. Girls will sunbathe in bikinis in the park. They sell condoms in public toilets. Do not accidentally enter sex shops, you may be traumatised for life. Better still, just don't go to Soho. I managed to shield them from a few things: Big Brother, the Sun Page 3, haggis, the thick haze of hash in Camden market.

Their favourite grocery outlet was Hoo Hing for all things Malaysian. Got taugeh and kaya summore okay. Everything Malaysian was of course superior.

Why the tube clanging all the time? Not at all smooth like the LRT.
You travel on this all the time?
If you stay in KL you can drive around, you know? Germs I tell you, all this public transport.

Again, everything in Malaysia feels, looks and tastes better too: the chicken, the prawn, the fish, the okra, the long beans. Exception made for tomatoes, cauliflower, mushrooms. Sandwich for lunch? You mean you eat bread for breakfast, lunch and dinner? Never heard of such a thing.

Wales, ah? A bit like Cameron Highlands, what? The country idyll merely reminded my dad of Kuala Kubu Baru (can you imagine?). Plus, fed on years of finest East Coast white sand washed beaches, they turned their noses when assaulted by the pebble beaches.

Canary Wharf like KL city centre only. East Ham, a bit like Brickfields but Brickfields better. Cleaner summore. Greenwich market? Like Bangsar pasar malamlah.

Okay. I get it. Next time, UK pergi Ulu Klang saja.

Cardigan Bay

'Now, I am quite prepared to believe that other countries can offer more obviously spectacular scenery. Indeed, I have seen in encyclopaedias and the National Geographic Magazine breath-taking photographs of sights from various corners of the globe; magnificent canyons and waterfalls, raggedly beautiful mountains. It has never, of course, been my privilege to have seen such things at first hand, but I will nevertheless hazard this with some confidence: the English landscape at its finest- such as I saw this morning- possess a quality that the landscapes of other nations, however more superficially dramatic, inevitably fail to possess...What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, of its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it. In comparison, the sorts of sights offered in such places as Africa and America, though undoubtedly very exciting, would, I am sure, strike the objective viewer as inferior on account of their unseemly demonstrativeness'.

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day at 28-29.

7 Bloggers Tag

I was tagged by 30in2005 to 'list seven bloggers that I do not know in real life but who I would like to meet and a hypothetical setting that would be ideal to meet them in'.

So, I am listing here bloggers I know only virtually unlike those people whom I've met online and have now become good real-life friends.

1. 30in2005 : Similar wavelength, similar age, similar new house moving madness. Oh, the stories to be exchanged about estate agents, being stuck on a property chain, etc. Regent's park would be a great meeting place.

2. Mint Chutney: She gives me hope that its possible to have it all-marriage, kids and career with a twinkle in the eye, homour in the heart and sarcasm for the soul. The ideal setting would be each others homes.

3. Masalachaii: She's so full of joie de vivre. Plus, there's the connection with academia. We could meet perhaps for chai at erhm...my current favourite eatery, Saravan Bhavan. With some thosa as well.

4. May: May is just so sweet and funny. We've been planning to meet like forever and she's tops on my list next time I head KL. Of course with a foodie like her, its got to be over food. Maybe char keuh teow but I'll let her choose-this girl knows her food.

5. Starlight : The book connection. Some nice cafe, maybe in Bangsar Village. We could drag Sharon along as well.

6. Lydia Teh: Like, hello-she's a real life celebrity writer and everything. Again, we missed each other the last time. Next time, we must meet. Coffee at Kino will be quite nice.

7. Atenah: She has such a sense of humour about academia and the accompanying stress. Anywhere in Bloomsbury so I can take her around my hang-out place. An little Italian cafe in Russell Square.

That timeless, mild, beguiling island of a town

I am off for the weekend, deep in Carmarthenshire, Wales to soak in the sights and sounds of the rural idyll. This is Dylan Thomas land and I am going to tremble and and recite 'do not go gentle into that good night'.

Flash Fiction

My friend Starlight sent a challenge via O magazine to : "to tell a story in less than 300 words or less. Something like, as O put it, a novel crossed with a haiku. The result was eight stunning pieces. Like exquisite hor'dourves".

After procratinating for ever so long, here's mine:

By evening, she was in love again. Not quite but mostly yes. Let us meet all over again, she must tell him. The planets would have moved to new astrological signs and may bode better things for their destinies. Surely time will pocket the aching residue of all the bruises? She sat waiting.

He was tired. Striding up her limbs, he groped with clumsy familiarity. The cold beer and tobacco slithered down her spine as the lazy sensitivities of her skin stirred.

In a few hours, she will open the front door for the morning newspaper and start breakfast.

(word count:99)

XXXX

Kak Teh suggested that the Flash Fiction would make a good meme and I think that its a great idea. You can get a better sample of Flash Fiction at Starlight's blog but remember- no more than 300 words. So all of YOU are tagged.

Weekend Again

Where does the week dissipate away? I only seem to recollect the weekend these days. I pretend to be doing work Mon-Fri but have so little to show for it at the end. Is tomorrow really Monday?

This is seriously starting to sound like a rant and I don't want it to because I had a really nice, lazy weekend. Sans work. Its been so long since I had one of those late lie-in, encased in sunlight mornings, sauntering at a market, stretching all the way to glorious afternoon in the park ending with white wine and strawberries kind of weekend.

There was another bonus-Zadie Smith. I went to watch her read an excerpt from On Beauty on Saturday. I was there on time but it was already packed. Two middle-aged women sitting at the back exchanged: 'She is so gorgeous'. I think most of them there were mesmerized by the lissom vision. And she read like a dream. To pin-drop silence in the hall. And took all those standard, mundane questions of 'what is your inspiration?', 'who are your influences?' etc which must have been brandished to her thousands of times. With utmost patience. No tantrums, no standoffish shrugs as slagged by the press. There was even a kind of shy bewilderment with all the attention.

Isn't it lovely that a writer you adore doesn't disppoint in person? Of course a cynic may say that its all a show-she needs to be nice now that she's had so much bad press about her atrocious behaviour. I can't be bothered about all that fine print really. She's great (except for brown shoes with black dress fashion faux pas ).

XXXX

On the Rushdie v Greer sequel, two literary giants battle out about whether the filming of Monica Ali's Brick Lane should continue in the area. There's been a big hue and cry by the Bengali community. I come from a country where censorship is a way of life (if you disagree with me, go to this blog). I don't think the protestors even appreciate all that is to be lost by if the filming is to be halted ( I think it already has).

I didn't think that Brick Lane was a particularly good book. I agree with some of the allegations made by the Brick Lane-ites. That the book projected some very stereotypical views about their lives. I don't know whether it is going to make a good movie. But like the book, we can all sit and criticize the film once it's made. Wouldn't that be better?

The Weekend (in parenthesis)

I seem to be unable to talk without parenthesis (theses?) these days. Maybe it is a subconscious reflection of how life itself meanders, stop- gap like between this interminable PhD. Everything else is a peripheral add-on (why do I keep plodding then? I don't know-I am a self-flagellating freak I suppose).

M and I threw the house open last Saturday for a summer party cum very belated house warming (9 months since we moved in. We are slow like that-we needed to sort the house first. Work and stuff like that caught up and after that, decided that we will wait for better weather. Which seemed worth the wait later because Saturday dawned with a light, refreshing shower. Such a welcome after the oppressive heat these past few days. It got fairly hot and sunny mid-morning but we managed with a few fans and air coolers). From late afternoon onwards, the air was cooler and everyone started streaming into the garden. There was BBQ and all manners of food, thanks mostly to my mom (my parents are on holiday here currently which has generally been lovely. On the days that I am working from home, I have company for breakfast and lunch. And the gastronomic delights that keep emerging from the kitchen. Wowzers).

Some of my favourite people turned up (even though they were choc-a- ful with work-so many thanks for the company). Unfortunately, I don't have any blog friendly photos. The last guests left around half 11 and goodness, were we exhausted. All the peeling, cutting, chopping and stirring the day before and the cleaning earlier suddenly seeped to our limbs (next time we are having a party, I am catering).

The next day, we woke up late, ate left overs and watched a really bad Hindi movie on TV.

Hello, Hello, Hello

I recently attended a conference in the heart of Whitehall. For a brief period, I felt that I had stepped back into a place frozen in time (I am into cheesy phrases currently) with large pictures of William Gladstone and Thomas Babington MacCaulay staring down at me (I know that blogtiquette necessitates a link here but they are old fogeys. And I am being lazy). The place even had a proper powder room (such a pity that I didn't have my camera with me). I could just picture the flawed high society women from Oscar Wilde going upstairs to powder their noses. And all the proper balls at the function room which was draped in regal, damask curtains and an ornate chandelier.

The conference however was very much about the present: development and poverty and all those things we think can be solved by discussing (maybe not?). It was all about talking, sharing, disagreeing and networking like crazy. The thing that struck me later after the whole conference was the hellos that were exchanged.

Hello. A word that punctures your life with a new person.

Hellos that make you laugh. An esteemed legal theorist who thinks Superman is better than Spiderman as a cultural concept. A whole new juxtaposition opens.

Hellos that introduce you to new thought streams. A centre-left wing, European hello gelled with a loud American right-wing hello over lunch. As the neo-liberal hellos fill me with a genial disbelief (can there be such a thing? Its all in the nice hello that started the conversation I say). Strange insights ensue. Hellos that agree to disagree.

Some hellos mean nothing. You know after leaving the room, you will never meet the person again. But there are nicer hellos that will seek you at the end of the conference, group a few others and go for a drink afterwards. Hellos that get slightly tipsy together and promise to meet up again.

The best hellos are the ones remembered later. When we become really good friends and recollect how we had first met.

XXXX

Last weekend, we were joined by friends of friends for lunch. It was later, when they stopped by at our place, that M and I knew this would be a hello that would blossom into a long, proper friendship.

XXXX

With regards to the all out war in Beirut, this diary-note by a Lebanese artist particularly struck me:

"I would have to leave behind all my artwork in my studio.
What about all my brushes and paints and glitter and books? (All my books!) What
about our photo albums? Our family pictures? What about the doodles I drew on my
balcony a few summers ago when I was suffering from a bad break-up? What about
all the love letters I have saved? Letters that document my youth that I wanted
to someday give to my daughter."

The destruction of ordinary lives as political chess games are waged.

The most sensible piece I've read about the problems in the middle-east has been by Ahdaf Soeif. Although I never liked her fiction, her non-fiction work is scintillating.

For Mumbai

From Salman Rushdie's "The Moor's Last Sigh":

Bombay was central, had been so from the moment of its creation: the bastard child of a Portuguese-English wedding, and yet the most Indian of Indian cities. In Bombay all Indias met and merged. In Bombay, too, all-India met what-was-not-India, what came across the black water to flow into our veins...Bombay was central; all rivers flowed into its human sea. It was an ocean of stories; we were all its narrators, and everybody talked at once.

Uma reminded me all over again about the city's spirit as it crawls under the debris of a meaningless, hateful attack.

On Turning One

Amidst the flurry of life passing by, in muted tones, this blog turned 1. I almost let it slip by but today, as any day is, an apt day to remember all that it means to me, especially the warm friendships and girl camaraderie that have bloomed as a result in this past year. I feel that we're old friends already.

To each one of you, the ones I know and don't, the commenting ones and silent ones. You've made all the difference to this blog in this past year. Thank you.

The pain in my heart

festers as tumescent old wounds are pried open and scratched. I am the sum of choices made, options discarded, chances blown away. Today, my cloistered world is blue, black and green.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change
The courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference
(anon)

Bawl. Repeat above. Internalize. Move on.